the diverse baseline challenge gave me a reason to finally reread the good luck girls by charlotte nicole davis, a fantasy western in which teenage girls take back their autonomy. 

on their sixteenth birthday/luck night, daybreak girl become night rise girls aka good luck girls and go from cleaning and cooking etc to being sex workers for the welcome house. the opening chapter takes place on clementine’s luck night, wherein she kills her brag (the word used for welcome house clients) because he chokes her. clem runs away with her older sister aster and three girls from the welcome house: tansy and mallow, who are younger than clem and have not been forced into sex work yet, and violet, who is aster’s age and the pet of the welcome house because she was born there. this world doesn’t have the same race and ethnicity descriptions we do, but clem and astrid are Black (astrid is on this cover), tansy is described as a light brown, mallow is said to have white skin and freckles and is indigenous, and violet is white. 

i’m not going to try to explain the whole world and magic system, but here are some important pieces. there are spirits with varying levels of violence and men who can control the minds of the good luck girls through the tattooed “favors” on their necks, on top of a system of oppression similar to the capitalistic hellscape we’re in now. people work themselves to death in mines to pay off their debts, families sell their daughters to welcome houses to pay off debts, and when the girls run away, they’re running into a violent world that still feels like a better option than staying in the welcome house. 

their destination is lady ghost, who can remove their favors from their necks which will give them a chance to start over. they befriend a guy named zee and find an underground (literally) network of people whose goal is to build through the network of abandoned mines until they’re able to reach outside of arketta. tansy and mallow are sapphics and are able to be together when they’re all on the run, and neither violet or aster are pushed into a love story. 

there were a few times i thought it was unrealistic how quickly characters recovered from injuries, but other than that i really enjoyed rereading this and am going to see if the library has the sequel. 

photo posted at TheSelfishSapphic on ig:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C3tTRDSPtg1/?igsh=NzBmMjdhZWRiYQ==